Sunday, 2 February 2014

The follwing comment came up two posts back, and I just thought it was too good and juicy not to get a post of its own:

"With respect Karl, perhaps you are a man that I don't fully understand. A long time ago, I was in Vietnam. My army friends and I were working
for the US. We were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by
bribing them. But our caravans kept being raided in the forest by the
tribals. So, we went looking for the tribals. For six months, we kept
giving them clothes,food,durables. One day, I saw a local child playing
with a broken radio given by us. The tribals had been throwing them
away.

Well, the tribals thought raiding was good sport. Because
some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be
bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to
watch the world burn.
You are [I] think such a man."

My initial response:

"Oh right, so because those people
didn't want to be assimilated by your way of life, there's something
'wrong' with them; because they didn't want to be bought off by invaders
on their own land, they're primitive and 'backward'.

Incredible, but not sadly uncommon, parochialism."

I should also have pointed out the commenter's anger at the inability to
successfully bully these natives, not to mention the rather lame Batman
quotation.

Srikant wrote:

'"Some men just want to watch the world burn."... while others like to set people afire on napalm.'

Best of all was my buddy Jeff's take:

"We are the people (antinatalists) he and his people (the rest of
the world) are trying to bribe and buy off. They keep giving us baubles
of this world, like material goods, religion, politics, art, promises of
love and friendship, and so on, to convince us of the rightness of this
world and its continuation. We turn their trinkets over in our hands,
and although they can be quite attractive and interesting, we find no
ultimate value in them, so we pass them along to our unborn children, to
see what they think. For them, they are meaningless toys. Since they
don't exist, they have no use for all those things.
Especially broken radios. :)"